What the Eyes Don’t See Until Too Late
A geography teacher once asked his class, of which I was an attentive member, to count how many oast houses (distinct cone-topped buildings in Kent once used for drying hops) we observed on our journey home from school. At the next lesson, I declared with confidence I had seen none. Unconvinced, he asked me to try again and pay proper attention. I did as told: the answer was 8!
The point of this story is to demonstrate how much in our routine lives we fail to notice. You sometimes have to stop, refocus, and look hard to see what has always been in sight. This is an allegorical message from my novel, Liberty Bound. Set in the distant future, society has imprisoned itself without noticing, hiding behind walls, avoiding the wide-open expanse beyond. Over time, fear and ignorance have shaped all decisions, normalising behaviours, diluting awareness, stagnating progress. Only when the heroes, Finbarl and Aminatra, have their lives torn apart, are they able to view the world with clarity, recognising its flaws.
So, back to our own time. Long gone are the town walls of medieval times, but we kid ourselves if we think fear and ignorance don’t build barriers throughout our societies and within the individual. Fear is an essential emotion of life. It’s what makes us stop and look both ways before crossing a road: it saves lives. But fear’s a beast that needs controlling or it can consume everything.
Society helps manage our concerns through its laws and communal support. It is a delicate balance between protecting freedoms and protecting people. Consider the act of crossing the road again. Let’s remove all laws, take away the pelican and zebra crossings. The safeguards are no more, a speeding car has no reason to slow or avoid pedestrians. Looking both ways offers little comfort. The chicken may decide it’s better to not even try crossing, depriving Western civilisation of its corniest joke!
So, how do we spot where fear is shaping our society? It is about recognising where the balance has lost its equilibrium. Some Russians hark back to the ‘glory’ days of the Soviet era when crime was low. That is one extreme: liberty sacrificed for security but fear ever present. In Mexico there are regions where state officials dare not go, the drug cartels ruling through fear. That is the other extreme: lawless and exploitative. In our society, most will believe we have the balance about right. But let’s stop, re-focus and look hard. On one side you have the management of personal data, so easy to collect and exploit through our online activities and in the hands and control of governments and businesses. On the other, you have drug gangs or feral teenagers running amok, putting some estates off limits, leaving people afraid to leave their homes after dark. Both sides hint at the world of the extremes. We respond by adding barbed wire to our fences, joining gated communities, setting up cameras, telling our children not to play beyond the front gate, resorting to encrypted services that empower terrorists, trusting no one, crossing the road to avoid the adolescents coming our way: the list goes on, the walls grow higher. The world we are trying to protect turns into a ‘prison’ without us noticing.
The solution lies in recognising where the road leads, accepting the need for a pelican crossing and a speed limit, but ensuring we maintain the balance, allowing all to get where they’re going without fear. It requires bravery, tackling the problems at root, not building barriers to ignore them, hoping they’ll one day go away. Otherwise liberty becomes bound.
So, keep your eyes open for those oast houses! It will help you in geography class.